THE Labour Party conference begins tomorrow, but the Brighton Conference Centre will be hosting a very different sort of conference to the ones we’ve become used to seeing there.

Ever since Neil Kinnock asked Peter Mandelson to help him modernise Labour’s image, party conferences have been pretty tame affairs as a succession of Labour bigwigs trooped onto the platform, and our TV screens, to launch, their latest policy initiative whilst ordinary party members sat and waited patiently for their brief moment at the microphone.

It was all a far cry from the days of Labour under James Callaghan and Michael Foot when party conferences involved the party’s left and right wings fighting for power in full view of the nation’s TV audiences. It made for great telly, and for we journalists it was always an exciting week by the seaside, but for the party’s public image, and subsequent performance at the ballot box, it was nothing short of an annual disaster.

And then came Mandelson, and conferences became, frankly, rather boring, but at least did no damage to Labours electoral prospects. But this year’s conference looks set to be like none of its predecessors, in no small measure due to the success of Jeremy Corbyn and the movement that’s played such a key role in his ascendancy - Momentum.

First, because whilst there will still be platform speeches from Labour bigwigs there will be far fewer; instead, more speaking time will be given to ‘ordinary delegates’ - though something tells me that a surprising number will be Momentum supporters.

Second, there will be an alternative conference taking place at the same time, competing not with the main conference itself but with the ‘official’ fringe.

This official fringe consists this year of no less than 369 events, designed to give think-tanks, pressure groups and big business the chance to bend the ears of the politicians and, to a much lesser extent, party members as well. But these meetings don’t come cheap, especially if the organisers are going to attract any sort of audience, in which case they need to offer drinks and food and the grander the better - not to mention paying for the rooms the flyers etc.

To do this means getting sponsorship from all those big corporations that Labour members love to hate and who, understandably, resent their presence at ‘their conference’, even if the money they bring in is not to be sneezed at.

But this year ordinary members have another bolt hole between conference sessions, for Momentum is organising its own fringe, ambitiously called The World Transformed.

With 104 events scheduled it’s much smaller than the official fringe but, given Momentum’s key role in the party it’s going to attract a lot of people. I know that, not because of my trusty crystal ball, but because a week before the conference it had completely sold out.

But aside from transforming the world, what else can we expect from this year’s conference? Certainly a hero’s reception for Jeremy Corbyn. When the snap election was called Labour trailed the Conservatives by more than 20 points, but they ended up denying the Tories an overall majority. Whatever you think of his policies there’s no denying that when it comes to campaigning Corbyn has a few lessons he could teach the very wooden Mrs May. But great campaigning is, for a party of government, not enough. Some in Labour think that just one more heave will get Mr Corbyn into Downing Street, but that one more heave is going to have to be an unprecedently mighty one.

For although Labour achieved a record-breaking swing in June, it will need just as big a swing next time round if it is to win sufficient seats to form a government on its own. And to do that it’s going to need to attract the support of many who do not see themselves as natural Labour voters. Blair won over those voters by convincing them that it was now “safe to vote Labour”. Jeremy Corbyn has a different task, in fact two tasks.

First, he must convince voters attracted to Blair’s party that when he talks about being “for the many not the few” Corbyn includes them in the “many” and not the “few”. But second, he must find a way of holding on to those Brexit-voting Labour voters, unconvinced that the party really does want to leave the EU.

There is no election on the horizon yet, so this conference is unlikely to be make or break for Labour; but if it looks more like a Momentum rally than the deliberations of a party of government, then Mr Corbyn’s task will have become just that bit harder when the next election does finally come.

  • Ivor Gaber is professor of political journalism at the University of Sussex and a former political correspondent.